


blow the candles, kiss the thorns

by kimaracretak



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Character Study, Gen, Horror, Jedi Ben Solo, Non-Linear Narrative, Psychological Horror, cosmic horror, stars that probably want to eat you, the galaxy loves ben solo and that is The Problem, voids in space that probably want to eat you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-15 08:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16059326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: Ben Solo, and the voices in his head and in the Force, from beginning to maybe-end.





	blow the candles, kiss the thorns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spookykingdomstarlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/gifts).



> I hear a silent voice  
> Time is a river echoing words meant to hurt  
>  _Blow the candles, kiss the thorns_  
>  Dry the tears, soon be gone.  
> — 'Paragon', Soen

Here is the end of the beginning: the knowledge that flight isn't easy.

Ben was born to fly, he knew that from the moment he was old enough to piece together the conversations of his parents' friends, the words that circled round him during the endless blur of dinner parties and lunch meetings and other things that he didn't understand. His father's son, his uncle's little starfighter, a streak of light aching for forward motion like nothing that could ever be contained by the simplicities of gravity.

He never wondered why they talked about him so, why they never thought he would be his mother's politician or his uncle's Jedi despite his title and his robes. He was just his father's pilot, as if he had to be because he wasn't anything else.

But none of that makes flight easy. More: from the moment he first laid hands on a navigation console, Ben Solo knew, as surely as he knew the feeling of metal against his fingertips, that if flight were ever to become easy, he would die.

Flight makes him think. Flight gives him numbers and vectors and paths, makes him think in an unfamiliar precise mathematical voice and speak out loud into the emptiness where stranger things might get too-clever ideas. Flight lets him transform, lets him punch a hole through the very fabric of reality into a new place, one where the voices are quiet.

(He always knew without saying that his father flew for different reasons. Perhaps that was why the distance between them grew so insurmountable so quickly.)

Here is the actual beginning: it starts with the voices, even though he wishes from the first that they would go away. It takes him longer to realise they're his and his alone, his in a way that not even his parents are. They're so inescapable he thinks for years that everyone is just better at pretending than he is, that there's some big secret the adults just haven't told him yet about how to make it better.

It wasn't so bad, in this, the first bright time of awakening when beginning shimmered in front of him like the pink Chandrilan sunrise. The words were nice, when he could understand them. They were hidden in the trees — _Ben, come here, don't you want to see the sky_ — and under the earth — _Ben, come here, we can explain everything_ — and the shapes that he half-glimpsed and that his mother never spoke of even when he wanted her to all seemed to say _friend_ , anyway.

(Here is the secret his family understands too late: the voices have hands, vines that wrap around his wrists and twigs that get caught in his hair. Here is the part they never knew: those hands took only what Ben gave, before and after he knew better.)

But he grew up, or they did, and he didn't even notice until the day when the whispers caught in his ear and the only thing they wanted from him was his darkness.

No more trinkets. No more blood. No more stories or imaginary friends.

The last things Ben gave to the forest were his tears, the night it rejected him, and after that, he tried to forget. 

After that, flight became a need, an escape, something that lived in his veins as surely as bloodburn stalked other pilots, except this isn't leading him towards death but towards —

— he doesn't, actually, know. He isn't sure it matters, isn't sure there's a destination at all, unless freedom from a thing impossible to stop carrying could ever be called a destination.

He skims the edges of black holes and watches his fingers stretch and pull, taut-strung flesh with a mind of its own wholly separate from his body. He stares for so long that his eyes cross, his ribboned-out skin fading to the smeared blue stars of hyperspace.

And it's quiet then. It's so very quiet, he doesn't even have to think. So very quiet he almost doesn't notice the absence of sound.

Here is the beginning of the end: a time that is not quite night, not quite day, and hardly even exists if the chrono is turned to face the wall. Ben knows he isn't alone, but he has never been less afraid of that.

He sets the autopilot. He stands up. Nothing takes his place, not even a shape, but the single word in a voice not his is unmistakable: _now_.

He means to sleep. He must sleep. He is to teach a lesson to Master Luke's new padawans tomorrow and he must have as much energy as the younglings.

But on his way to his bunk he sees the stars — so still, so sweetly bright — and he thinks: _I could do this forever_.

And here is the end, for real: Ben Solo is so full of light, and he will never stop flying, not even if the centre of the galaxy itself stood in front of him.

The stars swim outside his window, painfully sharp in realspace. Too sharp, too unfamiliar.

But he can read them anyway, their words no longer hidden: _Ben, you've come home. Ben, this is what you were meant for._

There is no safety amongst the stars anymore, no freedom from the grasping hands of the Force.

Because he has no ship around him now, and flight is easier than it has ever been.


End file.
